Slashdot Mirror
How Italian Police Shut Down U.S. Web Servers
gessel writes: "CNN has an article describing Italian police shutting down a U.S. hosted website deemed in Italy to be illegally blasphemous. The article goes on to describe the ramifications and U.S. efforts along the same lines."
If the content was created in one country and hosted in another country which laws should apply?
I bet if you were to ask an American they would say their laws should apply no matter where the content is housed as long as they created it. So what is so different about the Italian authorities believing the same? Just because you can do things outside of the normal laws of your respective homeland doesn't suddenly give you freedom from prosecution for breaking them.
I don't agree with the laws in question here but that isn't for me to decide, it is for the local people, in this case the Italians to decide to change the laws or allow them to stay as they currently are.
--- I do not moderate.
So... What's the big deal again?
Sure, it offends me that the Italian government discourages free discourse, but that's a matter for the government and the citizens of Italy to work out. Just because the site was hosted in the US does not extend legal protection to the person running the site. This would be as if I, say, obtained a copy of the Solaris source and kept it on a server in Iran, and the US forced me to delete it in order to avoid jail time. Regardless of if you think the laws involved are intelligent, I am still subject to the laws of my country.
If the Italian government had somehow forced the US hosting company to remove the speech in question, then we'd have a serious problem to discuss here. However, that now being the case, I don't see what the issue is.
Want something real to worry about? Try this: an American U student is charged with theft for taping a speech by Tipper Gore. They say he "stole" her intellectual property. I suppose from now on we'll need expressed written permission from Major League Baseball to describe what our political leaders are saying...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
It seems to me, that the twist here is that, for the US-based ISP, it seems that the users account has been effectively hacked. An unauthorized user (the Italian Police) have acquired the password and defaced the pages being hosted by the user. Simply because they did it from the proper uses own PC, doesn't mean it's not a hack, nonetheless, does it?
Does that mean that the US-based ISP can fire charges against, and request extradition of, the offending hacker from Italy?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
If the person is in prison, it is not a crime to limit their speach. It is done regularly. So it is still a non-issue. The person convicted of the crime might have been required to give up the ID and password for the site as part of the verdict. That would make it legally authorized access.
On the other hand, the police seemed to act more like 15-year-old hackers than police. They "...used a suspect's computer and password to reach across the ocean and replace the offending images with the insignia of the special police unit that tracked him down." That really doesn't seem very professional to me.
The problem is that the article doesn't specify if it was with the user's consent or not. And, if it was (for example, if consent was obtained through plea-bargaining), then it can't be considered a hack.
/. beloved case, for example.
The article brings up several more interesting points, referring to a
The United States, too, is guilty of trying to extend its reach.
A U.S. copyright law was used to jail a Russian programmer in California for writing software that was legal in his country. He was later freed, but charges remain against his Russian employer.
They also talk about how they had to wait for him to attend a conference in Las Vegas before they could do anything. It seems like the laws of jurisdiction are beginning to show holes of inadequacy: just how do you deal with the global village?
But guess what -- there's even more. I double-checked this next bit when I first read it, just to make sure.
And because a large part of Internet traffic goes through the United States -- even if both sender and recipient live elsewhere -- last fall's anti-terrorism bill lets the Justice Department prosecute foreign hackers when they attack computers anywhere in the world.
Leaving aside cracks about UUNET for the moment, can you imagine the complexities of trying to enforce something like this if you are dealing with an unfriendly country that doesn't like to extradite to the U.S.? And while other countries may not be in quite the same boat as the U.S. with regards to Internet traffic hosting, let's not forget it's all going somewhere -- depending on where you're sending your traffic, it can go through several different countries before reaching its final destination. And each of those countries has its own complex legal system.
This is already a big problem (several other points mentioned in the article indicate this: e.g. the Yahoo Auctions/Nazi memoribilia difficulty), and will only get worse. Wait for the big ruckus to ensue when it's decided a world court is needed to supervise these issues and the U.S. is only one amongst many countries that refuse to accept any exterior jurisdiction (a la the World Crimes Court). The thing is that most of the world can actually agree on what constitutes a war crime against humanity -- but how do you cope with deciding if a page in cyberspace constitutes a crime when you've got as many options on what's legal and illegal as you do countries in the world?
Consider a privacy law recently passed by the European Parliament requiring companies anywhere in the world to obtain permission before sending marketing e-mail to Europeans.
:)
Jim Conway of the New York-based Direct Marketing Association worries that U.S. companies may have to scale back U.S. campaigns if they cannot assure that their mailing lists contain no European addresses.
Someone let me know if this DOES happen.. I'll be wanting a European email address the minute it occurs
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
In the case of amnesty, you need to be accepted by the country from whom you seek help. Should it work the same for ideas? If you are afraid your ideas will be censored by your home country, get someone in the hosting country to help you by maintaining your site. This way the police would have to act in the hosting company to censor the content.
So in this case, the Italian citizen should have contacted a U.S. citizen before being caught. The U.S. citizen could then maintain the site, and when the Italian police struck, would have simply fixed the site and changed the password. Then the Italians would have had to fight the case here in the U.S. where our laws would likely protect the content.
As I understand it, this is exactly what FreeNet is supposed to do without having to formalize a relationship with others to host your content. They host it merely by viewing it a few times without having to stick their own necks out.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Suffering "distastefulness" is the price one pays for Freedom of Speech. And it's worth it.
"Break out the gin, and the small violin, I'm a raging success as a failure." --Firewater
I'm facing a similar situation. I run a web site (been live since Feb 96) which has a bunch of games, primarily aimed at small kids. It's hugely popular (1000's of unique users/day), I pay for the hosting myself and I just keep it up to bring a little happiness into the world. I live in Australia.
/.ers understand that (even if they don't agree with my actions).
Recently, I've been contacted by the FTC in the USA saying my site is not compliant with some new legislation called COPPA - the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act. I replied to them, pointing out that I was resident in Australia and this was reflected in the WHOIS record for my domain. I got a personal (ie. not form letter) response from one of their lawyers, basically saying they don't care where I live, and the legislation explicitly mentions non-resident sites (with some fairly vague caveats: http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/coppafaqs.htm point 20).
They have since started sending me snail mail (based on my whois record) with friendly messages encouraging compliance, but making it very clear they are watching me.
While I applaud COPPA and support its principles, I do resent being legally threatened by another countries government.
At this point, I have chosen to remain non-compliant. I don't do anything explicitly "wrong" under the act, I don't sell kids email addresses (from an e-card page), etc. But I haven't complied to their privacy policy requirements. I want to see what they do and how far they take this. At the end of the day, compliance is a trivial task and if they get really nasty, I can become compliant in 30 minutes. But it's the principle - I'm Australian and I'm not interested in the laws of another country. I'm sure
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